A Memoir by Carol Houlihan Flynn

Deer in the Headlines

When we lived in Newfoundland, Pennsylvania, deer hunters wandered the back roads every weekend in the fall. Carrying their guns or their bows and arrows, the men walked with confidence over our land, vigorously disregarding the no trespassing signs we posted over our five acres. I wouldn’t go outside in October unless I was covered in orange clothing. If you didn’t wear orange, you could be mistaken for a deer and, if you were shot, well, that was just your own stupid fault.

The former owner of our country house named it Deer Haven. She placed a kneeling deer made out of plaster next to the driveway. The lady was dead serious about the “Haven” part. She became famous for running out her front door at the first sight of hunters, waving her hands, and yelling at them to get the hell off her property. We were never so bold. As weekend and summer visitors, we didn’t feel as if we’d earned her native privilege to protest so vigorously. Besides, we knew that even if we did chase them away on a Saturday, they’d be back on our land Monday morning, hours after we’d gone back to New York. Guns blazing, Bows humming. We did keep her iconic deer statue in place, peeling and discolored from the hard winters.

Hunters were always ready to defend their actions. They weren’t killers, they argued, but noble warriors who suffered for their sport, rising at the crack of dawn to track down the white tailed deer. They admired their prey and would only hunt down the fit, the brave, and the wily, never the weak or the sickly. Their stories were full of the powers of mind and body that the deer possessed. It was an honor, they insisted, to cull such noble creatures. That was the inevitable reason for shooting a deer. Too many of them would ravage the land. They needed to be kept under control for their own sakes.

And there were indeed noble hunters in the land. Doc the Vet was one, a man who valued the life and the death of the animal he hunted. You can read more about Doc in my memoir, The Animals. One year I asked him what he was having for Christmas Dinner. “Bear heart,” he said. “It’s only fitting, a noble dish for an important holiday. And it’s tasty.”

But some of the hunting that I witnessed those days in Pennsylvania seemed ignoble and unheroic. Every fall Bow and Arrow hunters would make trips to the cider mill to buy apple peels, cores and pulp that had survived the fruit press. They paid good money for these leavings. Some cider mills refused to cooperate, but most could be talked into supplying the hunters with their bait. Hunters would deposit the fragrant mash around a tree large enough to hold a man and small enough to climb. Attracted to the good smell, deer would trot on over to scarf up their treat. Local hunters could seed their deer lures every other day. Weekend hunters weren’t so lucky and had to imagine that their tree would remain in their quarry’s memory all week long. After about a month of careful seeding, as soon as the Bow and Arrow season opened, the hunter would place his apple mash once more around the tree. Then all he needed to do was sit happily in his tree waiting for his unsuspecting quarry to arrive. It was guaranteed. The deer would inevitably be drawn to the sweet smell of rotting apple. Just as she bent her head down to feed, the hunter would pull his bow string back and let the arrow fly straight into her body. Like shooting fish in the proverbial barrel.

These videos do not show hunters seeding trees with apple mash. I am not suggesting that the hunters who videotape their kills use unfair methods. In fact some claim that they hunt to provide meat for the poor. Others explain that they are culling deer to keep them from overpopulating. Their videos can emphasize the beauty of the deer as well as the deadly power behind the bow–power transmitted into an arrow that can set an animal spinning into the air before it falls down dead. Beauty is juxtaposed to heart stopping scenes of death while a banjo picks out a tune in the background. Cheering us up or unnerving us? It depends, I guess, who listens and watches.

The saddest hunting stories I heard around Newfoundland involved the great black bears that lived in caves nearby. The most famous bear in the 1980′s was Frieda, an elderly lady past childbearing. She was seldom seen, but when sighted, behaved with great formality. All of the Black Bears were tagged. We could always find out approximately where they were in the neighborhood. In fact they were as close to being neighbors as animals could be. But during the short black bear season, about four days in late fall, and another four days in the winter, our friend the bear became Game. That’s when some hunters would hang bags of meat in the trees near Frieda’s cave. A hungry bear, attracted by the stench, would rear up on his back legs, swat the bag, and bring it down to devour it. As the bear ate up the bloody meat, it could be shot dead by a hunter sitting high in a tree. Nobody every killed Frieda, at least not when we lived in Newfoundland. She was too old and too smart to be taken in so easily. But younger bears could, and did, fall for such cheap tricks.

I’ve had ambivalent feelings about hunters for years, long after I left our house in Pennsylvania. It’s not all negative. I can understand the lure of tracking an animal. And I can always identify with hunters being out in nature in all weathers, taking risks to make contact with another species. But last weekend I read a long and complicated article about hunting written by Ryan Sabalow, a reporter for the Indianapolis Star. I urge you to click on the link to Sabalow’s well-researched and fiercely-written article. Ryan Sabalow is the real thing. I love newspaper people. My brother Tom Houlihan and Patricia Briske Houlihan, my sister-in-law are both extraordinary journalists. They worked in the Chicago area for many years on the late lamented Star and other South Suburban newspapers. Everything they wrote and edited was done with respect and care and passion. Sabalow is their kind of writer.

Sabalow and others on the Indianapolis Star spent eighteen months researching and writing the story of hunters willing to pay up to $40,000 to shoot penned in deer. Sometimes the decrepit deer is barely able to walk under the weight of their oversized antlers. The buck is shot while enclosed in a high-fenced pen. You might say it is “executed.”

Why are they treated so badly, these antler bearing deer? Because they are bred to grow unnaturally large antlers for hunters who want something significant to hang on the wall. What could be more telling than giant antlers, the sign of a buck’s power. In the wild, a buck with a large rack of antlers has lived a long life. His antlers truly are a sign of his cunning and his staying power. It takes a talented hunter to take down such a wise beast. You could even argue that the buck’s power can be magically transmitted to the hunter who brings it down.

Russ Bellar, the hunter who brought X-Factor into the world, laughs at the threat of CWD. His critics from the Department of Natural Resources are simply jealous. They know that they can never earn the hundreds of thousands of dollars that he can. How much money do you think that DNR inspectors earn, anyway? Who gives them the right to complain? It would seem that money grants rights. And in high-fence hunting, it’s all about money. What does the DNR know, anyhow? If you don’t have enough money, you don’t have the right to complain about people smart enough to invent such a noble sport.

The entire business makes me nostalgic for the hunters seeding our trees with sweet apple pulp. They at least were required to climb into a tree and wait for their prey.

The role that money, big money, plays in the creation of genetically engineered deer is most troubling. I can be persuaded that if deer need to be culled, and if a hunter is not only culling but also feeding others with the deer meat, that hunting has a purpose. The prices “hunters” pay for shooting deer in a high fenced range are in the many thousands of dollars. When you pay $40,000 to kill a deer teetering under the weight of his rack, you are not hunting. You’re buying a grotesque wall decoration.

This is a wonderful post. Living in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, one regularly encounters animal heads on the walls of homes and businesses. And no one seems to find it odd or gruesome, the displaying of dead creatures as “art”. The most disturbing aspect of deer hunting here is the fierce nature with which it is defended by those who practice it. I admit that there are some who hunt for food. But most “hunt” for sport, hoping to bag a buck with an impressive rack (which demonstrates the animal’s ability to survive for multiple seasons). Thus, the hunter winds up culling, from the dwindling, remaining wild herds, the strongest and wisest animals. It is a travesty. It is baffling that deer farms continue to thrive in a legal status. They will, almost certainly, be responsible for the extinction of deer as we know then. And unfortunate creatures like X-Factor represent the most vulgar appetites of man. Sabalow’s is an amazing article, well researched and thorough. Though it is a very long read (I printed it out… it is more than 40 pages, not including the video clips)it is a worthwhile one. Thank you, Carol, for bringing it to the forefront. And thank you, too, for another great post.

It is appalling that “hunters” think shooting a beautiful animal in a confined area is “hunting”. I recall the Teddy Roosevelt stories of just shooting as many gorgeous animals as possible to demonstrate manhood. Last night saw a program on Queen Victoria’s children … one segment referred to her son (later King) Bertie’s “hunting” in India. Overhunting. Proof of his manhood.
When men have to “prove” themselves as superior ( whether it is another race or wild animals) we all suffer. We must reach them as children to respect ALL others.
Thank you, Carol, for another thought provoking, although upsetting, post.

I agree with you, Janet. There might have been a certain logic to hunting in earlier times, but no reason at all now for constructing grossly improved hunting “targets.” The videos showing skinny, tottering deer almost collapsing under the weight of their antlers says it all.

These are headlines that I did not see. Thanks for bringing them to light. Are you in cahoots with John Stewart? Just as I feel like I’m missing important news if I don’t (at least occasionally) watch the Daily Show, I now feel that you are on the pulse of animalia. He uses humor and you use your wonderfully engaging writing style to look at some painful realities we would rather not see. I’ve been enjoying your blog and have started thinking a lot more about my relationships with animals. I was afraid of dogs as a child, even the small beagle that my family had for a short time. We had no other pets. Both my mom and her mom disliked cats and even threw stones to chase them out of the garden. Looking back I can see how I considered animals to be basically second class citizens. I neither liked them nor disliked them; they were just there. As a young adult I became a pacifist and a vegetarian, so I have an abhorrence of guns and no desire to eat chickens. But I cannot remove myself from the pain caused by human violence against animals, as you have described in your deer and chick posts. I cannot claim through ignorance or virtue to have no blood on my hands. How we treat animals is surely a reflection of how we treat ourselves and others. In my adult life, I have lived with three cats so far, growing closer to each one. Our current feline, Chloe, is the most difficult of all but also the most fun. I look forward to reading your book!

Dear Maureen,
Thanks for your comment. I remember the way dogs and cats were chased out of our back yards so many years ago. I think we live in another era now It’s almost impossible for us not to think harder about our relationship with animals of all sorts, animals we keep as pets, animals we visit in the zoo, and animals that are for sale in the stores as products to be consumed. You’re right about not being able to claim ignorance. One thing that has changed for us all is the way we are linked together by the media, whether we want to be or not. We just have more and more information about the connections we share with other people in other cultures, and with animals themselves.

I spent a lot of time hunting when I was a boy — wild pigs, sheep, upland game birds. I hunted wild pigs with a bow and arrow, and carefully, too. A wounded pig can hurt you badly. I nailed a few with arrows, but mostly with a .308 Winchester.

When I was living in the Solomon Islands I used to go wild pig hunting with my village friends. Dogs and spears, no firearms.

When I lived in Western New York I learned about tree stands and tree hunting and could hardly believe that anybody would call that “hunting.” What a joke! When I hunted, I had to use tracking skills, vision, knowledge of the habitat and where the animals were likely to be, and when, and what they were likely to be doing. Then, if I found them, I could feel that I’d earned the shot I’d take.

Not so for these tree stand wusses. That’s not hunting. It’s vile. I have nothing but contempt for those guys.

I still have my father’s .308, but I don’t have any archery gear any more. If those wusses come to Hawai’i, I’ll take them pig hunting. Then we’ll see whether they’re hunters, or butchers.

Thanks, Don. Your hunting takes time and knowledge and shows true respect for the animal you kill. I watched a number of videos made by the hunters sitting in trees. They seem to work very hard on their videos, shooting them and editing them so that they illustrate the various ways that the deer jumps, skids and crashes to the ground. And obviously they can shoot their guns and the do spend a lot of time sitting in trees. In all weathers. But their efforts and their knowledge don’t come near yours. You and hunters like you respect the animal and meet it on a common ground.